by Earl Swift
“It was hard to picture land, or even marshland, growing around it,” he says of the stump, which was 150 yards into the bay on the island’s far side. “But that was high ground once, to have trees growing out of it.” The next pot comes up with light gray mud smeared across its bottom—clay, a signal that we’re right now over some of that recent high ground. Inside the mesh wait another two lemons and Ooker’s real quarry—a peeler, or a crab about to molt, soon to be a soft-shell crab and a summertime delicacy at restaurants up and down the Eastern Seaboard. He identifies it with a glance and a squeeze, and drops it into a third basket.
We putter from float to float, down a row that runs straight for a quarter mile along Tangier’s southeast flank, the deck rocking gently beneath our feet. A few more peelers come out of the pots, along with number ones, some number twos—a little smaller, a bit less meaty—and an abundance of lemons. Osprey fly out from the shore to circle the boat. The sun bursts from a broken ceiling of dark clouds but fails to cut the chill. Ooker swings the Privateer around to start a second row. Thirty pots down. Another 180 to go.
“Out crabbing you see these tree stumps well offshore, and a light goes on,” he tells me as he hauls up the next pot. “I think about it sometimes—that I’m crabbing on ground that used to be shaded by large trees.” While he dumps crabs into the tray, I gaze over to the Tangier shore, now a quarter mile away, and try to imagine land in place of all that water.
TO LOOK AT IT on a map, Tangier seems the least likely of the old island burgs to have lasted so long. There never was much to the place, and it’s way out in the middle of eighteen trillion gallons of water.
At about two hundred miles long, north to south, the Chesapeake is America’s largest estuary, a mixing bowl for the tidal waters of the Atlantic and fresh water flowing from the Mid-Atlantic’s big rivers—the Susquehanna and Potomac, the Rappahannock and York, the James. It stretches from a northern “peak” at the Susquehanna’s mouth near Havre de Grace, Maryland, just a few miles south of the Pennsylvania border, to a twelve-mile-wide union with the ocean off Virginia Beach.
The bay’s upper half is narrow—in one spot, less than three miles across, and never so wide that one shore isn’t plainly visible from the other. But about a hundred miles south of its peak it promptly doubles in width; Maryland’s Eastern Shore, which separates bay from ocean and forms the Chesapeake’s right edge, is deeply notched there. Thirty miles farther south, give or take—and right at the line where Maryland and Virginia meet—the Eastern Shore again abruptly narrows, and the bay widens to roughly thirty miles across. It’s there, dead center at the Chesapeake’s broadest point, at the mercy of nature’s wildest whims, that you’ll find Tangier.
Little surprise that since its settlement it has felt more outpost than town, a place and people removed from the rest of their country. Come a hard January, the surrounding waters can freeze up so thick and tight that the military has to fly in food and heating oil. Rough weather any time of the year can maroon Tangier as well. Great expanses of open bay stretch to its south, southwest, and northwest—long “fetch,” in maritime parlance, which means there’s plenty of room for winds from those directions to build waves. Those compass points happen to correspond to storms that all too often sweep the bay, churning its relatively shallow water (it averages just twenty-one feet deep) into a heaving froth.
Even on calm days, reaching the place poses challenges that few other towns in America can equal. You can fly in aboard a small plane, if you have the wherewithal; an asphalt airstrip runs down the island’s western edge. Otherwise, the most convenient Virginia port, Onancock, is sixteen miles to the east-southeast, nestled at the head of a meandering creek. A summer-only passenger ferry takes seventy-five minutes to make the trip. The nearest town to the west, Reedville, is about the same distance away; that crossing by summertime tour boat takes ninety minutes. For the shortest transit, and the only year-round, reliable passage home, Tangiermen have to travel outside their own state, to Crisfield, Maryland, which lies just above that second notch in the Eastern Shore. This self-anointed “Crab Capital of the World” lies twelve miles to the island’s northeast. That voyage takes forty-five minutes in fair seas.
A typical run out of Crisfield sees the Courtney Thomas, Tangier’s mailboat, back away from the town dock at 12:30 P.M., its afterdeck piled with luggage, UPS boxes, and grocery bags, its enclosed cabin busy with chatting passengers, its wheelhouse the province of lounging island men and, at the helm, Captain Brett Thomas—distant kin to both Carol Moore and Ooker Eskridge and the fifth generation of his family to skipper the island’s chief link to the rest of America. At sixty-four feet, the Courtney Thomas is the largest boat homeported in Tangier, and its twin diesels hurry it along at about seventeen knots. In ten minutes it’s left the protection of the Maryland shore and ventured into an often tempestuous arm of the bay called Tangier Sound.
The marshes of Smith Island, six miles out, form a low skim of greens and browns off to starboard at about the time that Tangier’s water tower first appears, faint and spindly, on the horizon ahead. Over the next few minutes Swain Memorial’s church steeple rises slowly beside it, along with a clump of woods to the east. Rooftops emerge next, becoming a snaggled silhouette of houses, most of them smallish, two-story, and wood-framed.
Eleven miles out of Crisfield, Tangier remains a board-flat green wafer just above the water, but by now it’s becoming apparent that this is not a single island but a tight knot of three. The first you reach, home to the woods, is small and roughly circular. It’s owned by the nonprofit Chesapeake Bay Foundation, which uses it as an environmental education camp. It’s called Port Isobel these days, but to many a native it is still known by its original name, East Point, or the Point, which the locals (who turn any oy sound to eye) pronounce the P’int. It slides by to port.
Ahead lies the navigation channel into Tangier’s harbor, lined on both sides with an entire village on stilts—crab shanties, workboats tied up alongside, their sterns stenciled with the names of watermen’s wives and children. Most of the shanties are attached via decking to long rows of wooden shedding tanks, where watermen like Ooker Eskridge dump their peelers, then pluck them back out when they shed their exoskeletons to become the soft-shell crabs savored by gourmands.
If Crisfield is indeed the Crab Capital of the World, it’s largely because of this odd, watery little knot of industry, because Tangier’s shedding tanks produce more soft-shell crab than any other single source on the Chesapeake. Ooker’s shanty is halfway down the line and easy to pick out: Leaning against the hut is a sheet of plywood painted with an enormous ichthus, or Jesus fish, and the words WE BELIEVE.
The mailboat’s engines slow here, and its bow settles into the water for a calm six-knot chug into town. The channel makes a southwestern beeline for the town’s water tower, then swings to the right and heads west through a man-made cut to the island’s far side. Uppards stretches away to the north, the cut’s right side. To the south looms Tangier proper.
The Courtney Thomas doesn’t make the turn to follow the channel. The mailboat dock juts from the shore dead ahead, and Brett Thomas slides the boat alongside the long pier at ramming speed, only to brake to a stop with smooth precision in exactly the same spot he did yesterday, the day before, and hundreds of days before that. The mailboat’s arrival is among the island’s principal daily occasions, and it rarely occurs without an audience. Six afternoons a week, a gridlock of golf carts and curious old-timers is waiting.
I FIRST STEPPED off the boat in the summer of 1999, as a reporter for the Virginian-Pilot of Norfolk. My assignment was to explore how the place was faring eleven years after opting out of the Virginia Lottery, Tangier having been one of the state’s very few towns to ban the sale of tickets on moral grounds. It was an iffy premise for a story, but I was excited by the chance to experience a “quaint” place supposedly “lost in time”—phrases I’d found oft repeated in past stories about the island. I
called on the preacher at Swain Memorial, talked with town leaders and crabbers, dodged the bicycles and golf carts that plied the narrow streets—I could count the cars and trucks on two hands—and over the course of my stay slapped a thousand times at vicious, green-eyed deer flies that left deep, bloody craters in my arms, legs, and scalp and seemed to crave the taste of bug spray.
I left impressed by the town’s friendliness and its snug dimensions. Tangier proper is only a little higher and drier than Uppards, tidal wetlands accounting for something like 70 percent of its area. Solid ground is limited to three slender, parallel ribs of sandy loam that rise above the marsh—“ridges,” in island speak, though so low in elevation that if it weren’t for the buildings and the odd tree rising from their surface, you’d be hard-pressed to pick them from the surrounding wet. They amount to islands within an island. To put their relative size in landlubbing terms: All of Tangier, including Uppards, the P’int, and a few outlying, marshy islets, is a bit smaller than New York’s Central Park. The ridges, lumped together, would fit inside the reservoir at the park’s center, with plenty of room to spare.
A few months later, as the media fretted over what might happen to the world’s computers on January 1, 2000, the Virginian-Pilot’s editors dispatched me again to Tangier—this time because they figured that if Y2K brought global economic chaos and social collapse, the island and its old-fashioned, analog ways would plod on, unfazed. After all, it got by without cars. Its dial-up internet was too glitchy and glacial for much besides email. Its population didn’t get home phones until 1966 and lacked reliable electricity until 1977—and most every household still had a VHF two-way radio and kerosene lamps on hand, just in case. My editors reckoned the town might be the safest place in America that New Year’s Eve.
While experiencing what had to rank among the quietest millennial celebrations anywhere, I spoke with a lot of islanders. A consistent thread ran through our conversations, one that was far more elemental than a breakdown in technology. The very water that had provided Tangier’s sustenance for more than two centuries, they told me, now posed a real threat to its future. So in March 2000 I returned with a photographer, and over the course of six weeks we gathered evidence of the erosion that was steadily claiming the place.
That’s what everyone called it then—erosion. Global warming had been discussed by scientists for more than a century, and the term itself dated at least to 1975, yet in 2000 neither the phenomenon nor the handle had wormed far into the public consciousness, especially on Tangier; islanders had not yet been schooled in the notion that the bay was rising or that the ground underfoot was sinking. But they sure enough saw that their home was getting drownded, and the anointed representative for their views was James Wyatt Eskridge, also known as—always known as—Ooker.
This was eight years before he became mayor. His résumé, had he had one, would have painted him an unlikely spokesman. Ooker spent every summer day crabbing for peelers. He passed the late autumn catching eels for the Italian Christmas market and the winter dredging for crabs and oysters—which is to say, he spent a lot of time in boats, mostly alone. Even so, he was emerging as the community’s public face. Then, as now, he was a tall, lean, ruggedly handsome fellow, with ice-blue eyes, a limber vocabulary, and a fondness for conversation. The camera loved him, and unlike many Tangiermen, he didn’t seem to mind the camera.
Ooker carried me in his skiff around the P’int, where the bay had snuck beneath a forest of loblolly pine; the remaining trees were falling, one by one, into the surf in that spring of 2000. We rode to the sandy spit guarding Tangier’s southern end, where he landed the boat and we strode among cordgrass and quivering blackberry to the beach’s low crown. From there, he pointed out places where he’d played as a teenager that were now a hundred yards or more offshore.
Ooker was forty-one at the time. This had happened fast.
The spit ran south for nearly a mile before hooking eastward, then doubling back on itself, forming a tail that gave the island the unmistakable shape of a seahorse. But that sandy coil had withered since his youth, Ooker told me, and it had shifted eastward. Down at the hook there’d been a big house in the seventies and, before that, at least three fish meal plants—factories, unlikely as that seemed, where oily little fish called menhaden were processed into fertilizer. The house was survived only by its water well, a rusty pipe jutting from the waves. The last vestige of the plants was a broken concrete slab overwashed by the surf.
I TOOK A sea kayak to the island late in that 2000 project, and while paddling around Uppards one morning I beached the boat at Canaan. A copse of tall pines stood at the old townsite, which was still a fair piece inland and well above sea level. You could see the trees plainly from a mile south, down in Tangier proper. A single-wide trailer, left over from a hunting lodge that Carol Moore’s uncle had operated in the seventies, sat there as well, perhaps 150 feet from the water.
Sixteen years later, what’s left of the trailer’s rusted chassis is in the bay, and the trees are long gone. The land at the north end has morphed profoundly: When I met Carol Moore shortly after my return, she showed me pictures of Canaan she took just four months before, depicting fingers of peaty land jutting into the water alongside pockets of sandy beach. “Everything in this picture is gone,” she told me. “I can see it at Uppards from one week to the next. In the past few years, I know I’ve seen—I know it sounds crazy—but I know I’ve seen maybe a hundred feet gone in maybe three years.
“You used to, if you stepped off that north shore, you were on sand for quite a ways out. Now you step off and you’re in the bay,” she said. “It’s all gone.”
Ooker Eskridge thus presides over a smaller island than existed just months ago, let alone on my previous visits. Everyone agrees, in the Tangier way of putting things, that the place “is going away from here in a hurry.” The island is far from convinced that scientists are right about what’s causing the trouble, however. Erosion had been stealing land in the Chesapeake decades before anyone talked about climate change, they’ll tell you. Why, look at Holland Island. Rising seas didn’t kill it. Waves simply tore at the shore where most of its households were concentrated, until people there had to move. Like Tangier, Holland had little high ground, or “uplands,” meaning the refugees couldn’t move from one part of the island to another—another wasn’t available. So they were forced to the mainland, which slashed Holland’s population, undermined its economy, and sparked a cascading failure of the entire enterprise. By 1916, the population had dropped to 169. Four years later, not a single person was left.
Count the mayor among the doubters. “Our main concern is the erosion,” Ooker tells me while we’re crabbing. “Sea-level rise, that might be occurring, but it’s small-scale next to the erosion.
“I’m not so sure it’s man that’s the cause of it,” he says. “That’s my thing, is how much of it is man’s cause. I don’t think man can do a lot to affect it.” Tangier’s dilemma seems to him more a product of nature’s regular cycles, part of a divine plan far beyond the influence of mere humans. And, perhaps, a harbinger of the coming Judgment. “We’ve been taught from early on to look, as the Bible says, for signs of the latter-day times.”
He’s standing at his console as he says this, steering the boat and casting a steely gaze off into the middle distance. “One of the signs to look for, it says, is knowledge and travel greatly increased—and just look at how much knowledge and travel have increased.” He switches his focus to me. “The other thing,” he says, “is that things that used to be bad will be seen as good, and things that were good will be seen as bad.” He raises his eyebrows.
Carol Moore shares his skepticism. “When glaciers melt the sea probably rises, but that’s not what is going to take Tangier away,” she told me as we sat at her coffee table, which doubles as a display case for bottles, clay pipes, and arrowheads she’s found up at Canaan. “Tangier’s demise is going to be erosion.”
But
hers is a political distinction, more than biblical. “If the government officials insist that it’s sea-level rise, what can you do about sea-level rise?” she asked. “Nothing. Not a thing. And if that’s what they see this being, then they won’t want to spend any money to try to stop it.
“We’re one strong storm away from being a Holland Island,” she said. “If we don’t get help, we’re going to be history. The end.”
Perhaps just as daunting, the mayor’s constituency has withered even faster than his island. Since 2000 the population has dropped from 604 to 481, or by a fifth in sixteen years. It has aged, too: Young islanders now tend to strike for the mainland after high school, leaving few couples of childbearing age, at least by the standards of Tangier’s fertile past. The one schoolhouse serving all the island’s children, kindergarten through twelfth grade—the only combined school left in Virginia—had one hundred students in 2000; enrollment has dropped by a third since and is projected to dwindle to fifty-three in 2020. Incidentally, the class of 2020 already has its valedictorian and prom king: Matthew Parks is its sole member.
TRUTH BE TOLD, all but a minuscule minority of scientists are certain that the forces threatening Tangier and other beleaguered sections of America’s eighty-eight-thousand-mile shoreline are indeed the products of humanity’s hand on the environment. We’re years past the point when a human role in climate change was only a theory.
In fact, a February 2016 report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that the jump in sea levels during the twentieth century “was extremely likely faster than during any of the twenty-seven previous centuries,” which is to say, since at least 800 B.C. The authors, scientists from Singapore, Germany, Britain, and the United States, cited research suggesting that without man-made global warming, sea levels might actually have fallen around the world during the twentieth century. Instead, they rose by nearly half a foot.